Everything Trump Touches Dies review: a poison dart in the neck of the Republican monster
A few examples of Wilson’s
eviscerations: “Everything about Trump’s opening
speech was moral poison to anyone who believed in any part of the
American dream. Everything about his nationalist hucksterism smelled like … a
knock on the door of authoritarian statism.”
The right is “merrily on board with a
lunatic with delusions of godhood”.
“There’s an odds-on chance that our
grandchildren will hear this tale while hunched over guttering fires in the
ruins of a radioactive Mad Max-style hellscape.”
“Washington is the drug-resistant
syphilis of political climates, largely impervious to treatment and highly
contagious.”
The tax bill was a masterwork of
“gigantic government giveaways, unfunded spending, massive debt and deficits,
and a catalogue of crony capitalist freebies”.
The Trump administration has been “a hotbed of
remarkably obvious pay-to-play and corny capitalist game-playing. How obvious?
Think 1970s Times Square hooker on the corner obvious … The degree to which
this president has monetized the presidency for the direct benefit of himself,
his soft-jawed offspring, and his far-flung empire of bullshit makes the Teapot
Dome scandal look like a warm-up act in the Corruption Olympics.”
The presidency “hasn’t been an
endless exercise in self-fellation, until now”.
While people like the New York Times
executive editor, Dean Baquet, wring their hands in public over
using the word “lie” too often because they worry that it will lose
its power, Wilson makes one brutally accurate judgment after another about the
men and women who have enabled this embarrassing excuse for a sentient
president.
“Then Trump came along ... The
monster is out of its cage, and its new trainers (both here and in Russia)
encourage only its dumbest, darkest, most capricious, cruel and violent
behaviors.”
His book is intended as “one of a
number of poison darts in the neck of the monster”. And it’s hard to imagine
many of his victims looking themselves in the mirror again if any of them have
the courage to read this volume.
“All the things evangelicals had said
for generations that made a candidate anathema were suddenly just fine … Being
a goddamned degenerate pussy-grabber with a lifetime of adultery, venality, and
dishonesty is not, to my knowledge, one of the core tenets of the Christian
faith … Trump has opened entirely new theological avenues … There is literally
not one aspect of Trump’s behavior as a citizen, a husband, and as a man that
shows the slightest scintilla of repentance for anything, ever.”
No one else who has penetrated
Trump’s orbit fares any better here. Steve Bannon “looks like the spokesmodel
for a new line of gout medication … His rheumy-eyed stare and an odd
constellation of facial moles, warts, scrofula, weeping sores and grizzled
beard patches make him look vaguely piratical.”
But this book is more than endless
stream of vicious personal insults. It also unravels the complete intellectual
bankruptcy of the “ideology” of this mad administration. Besides all the
schadenfreude it will give to Trump’s enemies, it contains a single, invaluable
piece of advice for the Democrats, who Wilson says are missing “a massive
market opportunity in the era of Trump”.
Under this president, the GOP has
abandoned “any pretense” that it cares about the national debt. The Democrats
could “move votes and donations” by advertising what they have really been for
several decades already: the “real party of fiscal sanity, probity and
responsibility”.
After all, Bill Clinton was the only
modern president to end his second term with an actual federal budget surplus –
something destroyed by George W Bush’s tax cuts and then made permanently
unimaginable by Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan and Donald Trump.
- UK readers can order Everything Trump Touches Dies at the Guardian Bookshop
